"I want to clarify something that happened on Monday's show. [Sullivan was calling into his show—he has scheduled days off and is not away from the studio because of this controversy.] "We were talking about Barack Obama and his ability to excite crowds through his speaking ability, through his rhetoric. I mean he's an orator that is unbelievable. I was talking about the fact that he had this big speech after winning over the weekend all of these primaries and I thought wow this guy can really knock it out of the ballpark when it comes to his speech. We were talking about and playing clips about how Barack Obama was getting cheers and the crowd was going wild and he was talking about winning. And a caller called and suggested, the caller suggested that he thought that Hitler had the same ability....
"Well once you enter the word Hitler into a conversation, everything changes so I said really? So we played clips of both to let you decide. Well guess what happened? Sometimes people pick up on things and they pick up on them in a way that they really misinterpret what's really going on. Some people took what we said on Monday and suggested that I was in some way equating Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler and there was nothing of the sort that came up. Nothing like that happened. In fact, you know and I know, everyone knows, Hitler was one of the most despicable evil people, mass murderer who without question, was one of the worst people to ever walk the face of the earth. No humanity, absolutely, there is no comparison. I wasn't trying to make a comparison. There isn't any comparison. There was none yesterday. There was none Monday.... Absolutely pure nonsense that anyone would think otherwise, but it has come up with some people picking up and it's one of those things, they hear only part or they hear what they want to hear, but in any case, I wanted to clarify it before I took off for the day and went out and did some Valentine stuff."
On the Feb. 11 broadcast of Fox News Radio's Tom Sullivan Show, the host took a call from a listener who said of an Obama speech, "It harkens back to when I was younger and I used to watch those deals with Hitler, how he would excite the crowd and they'd come to their feet and scream and yell." Completely skipping over the fact that his listeners spent their youths listening to Hitler speeches, Sullivan went on to play a "side-by-side comparison" of a Hitler speech and an Obama speech. Sullivan even joined in at one point, yelling "Yay! Yay!"
Another caller complained. Sullivan said he wouldn't play the comparison again but later begged, "Can I, please, one more time? Just one more time? Then I won't do it again." Mediamatters.org went apeshit. And now, Sullivan has done his mea culpa, kind of.
So now can he play it again?